At school we had a network of Acorn Archimedes machines. We all had space on the file server, which the grumpy admin would search through regularly. There was an autorun feature in RiscOS which allowed a hidden script to execute on opening a folder, eg my network folder. It just so happened that passwords were stored unhashed, so I had everyones passwords appear in my folder one day. I must have been 12 or 13, as my family relocated when I was 13.
At the new school they had the same machines, so I put my knowledge of the platform to good use. I wrote an app which played a sound sample of a loud obnoxious burp at random intervals during class.
At college they had a Novell network. The login was a simple text prompt, which I discovered called in to a novell DLL. I wrote my own substitute login command which also saved the password to local disk somewhere, and replaced the default version on a few machines.
In both cases my reaction was the same on discovering my password hacks had actually worked. I crapped my pants and covered my tracks!
By the time I had started uni, I had largely grown out of that stuff. But something triggered a latent interest I had neglected for too long... the campus accommodation was based in tower blocks, with an entry intercom system. I noticed 4 very quiet dtmf tones whenever buzzing my friends apartment. I can't remember how I did it, but I found a way to get a dial tone and to my delight, 9 for an outside line worked fine using the type of handheld dtmf dialer banks used to give out.
At the new school they had the same machines, so I put my knowledge of the platform to good use. I wrote an app which played a sound sample of a loud obnoxious burp at random intervals during class.
At college they had a Novell network. The login was a simple text prompt, which I discovered called in to a novell DLL. I wrote my own substitute login command which also saved the password to local disk somewhere, and replaced the default version on a few machines.
In both cases my reaction was the same on discovering my password hacks had actually worked. I crapped my pants and covered my tracks! By the time I had started uni, I had largely grown out of that stuff. But something triggered a latent interest I had neglected for too long... the campus accommodation was based in tower blocks, with an entry intercom system. I noticed 4 very quiet dtmf tones whenever buzzing my friends apartment. I can't remember how I did it, but I found a way to get a dial tone and to my delight, 9 for an outside line worked fine using the type of handheld dtmf dialer banks used to give out.